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Throughout the year we worked at maintaining and painting the vessels secured at the Academy waterfront. The school had lifeboats, running boats, sailboats, a wooden-hulled “Submarine Chaser” and the “Training Ship.” During the years that I was at the Academy, most of these ships and boats, being holdovers from World War II, were hardly new. They were in constant need of maintenance and repair, which, of course, fell to us midshipmen. Most of the other academies had the funding to hire a permane
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The City of Boston allowed us to dock at the dilapidated Mystic Wharves, right next to where the ships from the Havana Line used to tie up. Without knowing it, we were witnessing the end of an era. Steamship companies that connected Cuba with the United States were dwindling, as commercial aviation came into its own. The Havana Line was already gone, and the New York & Cuba Mail Steamship Company, commonly called the Ward Line, was a shipping company that operated from 1841 until 1954 and ran “W
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